Harvard Professor Compares Facebook Timeline Posts to Mouse Poop

Facebook Timeline is finally, totally, completely here for everyone (who didn’t already hack their way into it)! Huzzah! If you don’t know what Facebook Timeline is, you’re about to: It’s the social network’s new interface that gives you not one, but two profile pictures. Again: Huzzah! Also, it organizes everything you’ve done on Facebook into an indexed, historical record. It is crazy. So crazy, in fact, that it prompted one Harvard professor to note with disgust—in the New York Times, no less—that in the context of Timeline, your life on the internet is evolving into…a series of very organized pieces of mouse poop. Seriously.

“There’s no act too small to record on your permanent record,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard who studies how the Internet affects society. “All of the mouse droppings that appear as we migrate around the Web will be saved.”

Yup! Facebook Timeline is crazy and scary. But again, remember, you get two profile pictures, so your little mousy face can be in two places at once right above your very organized and despicable life that is so well indexed it makes opposition research for the day you decide to run for public office look less like an actual task requiring skill than one requiring mostly just sentient brainwaves.

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